Chapter 101: Aftermath
Fennick’s information broker instincts did not, as a rule, extend to enthusiasm for actual fieldwork, which was why he spent the better part of an hour trying to talk Lancelot out of the idea before finally giving up and simply telling him where House Ashendel’s last known residence in the lower city was, on the condition that if Lancelot got himself killed doing something this stupid, Fennick would deny ever having spoken to him.
"You understand," Fennick said, walking half a step behind him through streets that grew narrower and less lit the closer they got to the old tannery district, "that the Seventh Heir of the Veyrion Empire is currently walking into a slum at dusk because he’s curious about a dead nobody nobody’s supposed to care about."
"I contain multitudes."
"You contain a death wish wearing a very convincing coat."
"The coat’s not that convincing. Half the guild masters down here could spot Imperial tailoring from a rooftop." Lancelot kept his pace unhurried, hands loose at his sides, cataloguing exits out of habit rather than fear. "Which is exactly why nobody’s going to bother me. A Veyrion walking around alone and unarmed down here isn’t a target. He’s a trap someone else is supposed to worry about springing."
"That’s either very clever or the last thing you ever think."
"With any luck, both."
The Ashendel residence turned out to be a narrow, sagging house wedged between a shuttered leatherworks and a building that had clearly given up on structural integrity some years prior, and Lancelot had barely registered the crack of raised voices coming from somewhere inside it before Fennick’s hand closed hard around his arm, hauling him sideways into the mouth of an alley.
"That’s not a family argument," Fennick hissed. "That’s a—"
The scream cut him off before he could finish, short and cut short in turn, and Lancelot pulled his arm free and moved to the alley’s edge, low, close to the wall, in time to see the house’s side door burst open and a woman stumble out into the narrow street clutching her side, blood already dark and spreading between her fingers, moving with the particular staggering desperation of someone who knew, with total clarity, that she wasn’t going to make it anywhere.
The man who followed her out didn’t hurry. That was the detail Lancelot’s mind fixed on later, turning it over long after the rest of it had blurred, the way the man walked out of that house like he had all the time remaining in the world, a plain knife held loose and unbothered in one hand, his face arranged into an expression of tired, almost apologetic resignation, the look of a man doing something he found distasteful but had long since stopped finding difficult.
"You didn’t have to run," he said, and his voice carried easily down the empty street, conversational, almost gentle. "It would’ve been faster if you hadn’t run."
"Corvin." The woman’s voice cracked on the name, half plea, half accusation, her back finding the wall of the leatherworks and sliding down it, legs no longer willing to hold her. "We’re family."
"We were family when there was nothing worth fighting over. That stopped being true the day Uncle Ashendel decided you’d inherit the old claim instead of me." He crouched in front of her, unhurried, the knife still loose in his hand, and something in his tone shifted, quieter now, almost sad. "I looked, you know. For another way. There isn’t one. There’s never actually been another way, not for people like us. Just people who’ve figured that out, and people who haven’t yet."
She said something Lancelot couldn’t hear, a whisper too thin to carry, and Corvin leaned closer to catch it, and whatever her last words were, they didn’t stop him from finishing what he’d started, the knife moving once, unhurried, exactly the way everything else about him had been unhurried, and the street went silent except for a sound Lancelot felt more than heard, a low, resonant pull, like air rushing to fill a space that had just opened somewhere it shouldn’t have.
He watched it happen with his own eyes and still, afterward, struggled to describe it as anything other than what it looked like, which was light. Not fire, not the pale shimmer of the minor cantrips court mages used to light rooms or chill wine, something older and heavier than that, a faint golden unraveling that lifted off the dying woman’s body in slow, deliberate threads and crossed the space between them and sank into Corvin’s chest like water finding the lowest point in a room. His shoulders squared. The lines of exhaustion in his face smoothed, not entirely, but enough to notice. When he stood, he stood straighter than he had crouching down, and when he looked at his own hand, turning it over once in front of his face, there was something in his expression that Lancelot recognized immediately, because he’d felt its shape before in his own chest without ever having a reason for it, the particular vertigo of a man realizing he’d just become something slightly different from what he’d woken up as that morning.
Corvin wiped the knife clean on his own sleeve, unbothered by the blood already there, and looked directly down the street toward the alley mouth where Lancelot and Fennick were pressed into shadow, and for one long, cold second Lancelot was certain he’d been seen, certain the whole evening was about to end very badly for two men with no business being in this part of the city at all.
Then Corvin turned and walked back into the house without hurrying, and closed the door behind him, and the street was empty again except for the woman’s body slumped against the leatherworks wall and the two of them frozen in the alley, and Lancelot realized he’d stopped breathing at some point without noticing.
"We need to go," Fennick whispered, already pulling him back deeper into the alley. "Now. Before someone else decides to be curious the way we just were."
They didn’t speak again until they were three streets away, until the tannery district had given way to better-lit roads and the particular relief of crowds that made two more men just two more men, and even then it was Lancelot who broke the silence first, his voice lower than he meant it to come out.
"Did you see that."
"I saw a man get gutted by a knife and I’d very much like to unsee it, if it’s all the same to you."
"Not the knife. After." Lancelot stopped walking, forcing Fennick to stop with him, and found that his hands, when he looked down at them, weren’t entirely steady. "The light. It went into him. I watched it go into him."
Fennick’s face, in the light of a passing street lamp, had lost most of its usual careless humor. "I’ve heard stories. Everyone’s heard stories, about the old blood families, about what happens between people who carry it when one of them dies to another. I always figured they were stories the way most things down here are stories, half true and mostly exaggeration."
"That wasn’t exaggeration." Lancelot’s mind was already working, fast and cold, running the shape of what he’d just seen back through everything he’d overheard in the palace over the years without ever once understanding what he was hearing, the herald’s careful skip past the Ashendel name, Isolde’s sudden, uncharacteristic interest in old succession law, the particular tired resignation on Corvin’s face, a man who’d looked for another way and found there wasn’t one, not for people like us. "That was real. That was the entire family, working the exact same rule the seven of us are supposed to be working, and nobody at that palace ever bothered mentioning it applies to the rest of us too."
’Or,’ he thought, and the thought arrived with a clarity that felt less like realization and more like something finally clicking into a shape it had been waiting to take for years, ’they didn’t bother mentioning it because they assumed I’d never live long enough to need to know.’
He started walking again, faster now, and Fennick had to lengthen his stride to keep pace.
"Where are we going?"
"Nowhere yet. I need to think." Lancelot’s voice had gone flat and quiet in a way Fennick had apparently never heard from him before, judging by the sideways look he got for it. "But I think, very soon, I’m going to need to have a long conversation with someone who already knows exactly what that light was, and precisely how much of it is currently sitting inside my brothers and sisters, and has simply never seen a reason to mention it to me."
"Nowhere yet. I need to think." Lancelot’s voice had gone flat and quiet in a way Fennick had apparently never heard from him before, judging by the sideways look he got for it. "But I think, very soon, I’m going to need to have a long conversation with someone who already knows exactly what that light was, and precisely how much of it is currently sitting inside my brothers and sisters, and has simply never seen a reason to mention it to me."